Whenever I’m trying to figure out a new way to tell a story, there’s a quote from one of the inventors of virtual reality that always pops into my brain: “Information is alienated experience.” Or, like my middle school English teacher used to say, “Show, don’t tell.”

So when you go out to cover an event, don’t bring back a product, a widget, a good, a 10-inch inverted-pyramid story. Use multimedia and interactivity to bring your audience along for the ride. Make them feel like they’re in the room with you. Cover the event live, and then repackage your live coverage to attract the search engine audience.

Do background research so you have some idea of what you can expect to happen. Because news is when the world doesn’t behave as you’d expect. So first you have to know what to expect. Know the players and the rules. Look at old stories, get a copy of the meeting agenda or the speech text if possible. Check out the group’s website and social media accounts. Check out national press, too, if warranted.

Make a Twitter list of everyone you expect to be in attendance at the event — that includes “official” event participants as well as observers.

Make another list of anyone you think might be interested in the topic. You might find these are folks who already follow you on Twitter, or folks that have re-tweeted similar stories, or just people who’ve been talking about similar topics.

Make sure you know any hashtags related to the event. If there isn’t one, make one up and tell your followers to use it during the event. For the most important hashtags you expect to be used during the event, create a saved search on Twitter.

Get there early. You never know what might go wrong — you can’t find parking, there’s no WiFi, no place to put your camera, room is full, flock of rabid seagulls attacks…

Tell people that you’re getting ready to start live tweeting an event. Tell them where you are. Tell them about how long you’ll be at it. You’ll be using your personal account for credibility and intimacy.

Listen for key quotes, and either paraphrase them or attribute them: – “Obama: ‘My role here is done.'” or “Obama says he is resigning from office.”

Listen for key facts that provide context: -“27% of new students hail from Antarctica.” or “Construction on Gryffindor began in 2011 and was scheduled to cost $3.1B.”

Listen for news: “Board voting now on whether to oppose Amendment One.” or “Board’s vote on Amendment One unanimous. Everyone’s opposed.”

Provide both “play-by-play” coverage as well as analysis: – “Somewhat unexpected to hear all sides agree on that issue. Where was the opposition?”

Use hashtags. Hashtags can be used to help your audience find other tweets on the topic, but they can also help your tweets find an audience that cares about the topic but doesn’t yet know you’re covering it. Finally, you can use hastags for commentary (but be careful with that.)

Ask questions of your audience during the event. Questions can either seek information: “Dept. of Labor says it’s still interviewing witnesses. I’d like to interview you, too. Did you see the Vortex collapse?” … or they can seek opinion. “Rides inspected 3x/day. Fairgoers- Is the Dept. of Labor doing enough to keep you safe?”

When you receive responses, re-tweet the interesting ones. Think of yourself as the host of a call-in talk show. Re-tweeting adds interesting voices to the live event and puts yourself in the position to mediate a conversation between your followers. That’s creating an experience rather than just a story.

If you make a mistake, correct it. If it’s an egregious fact error — “Thornburg found guilty of murder!” — delete the original tweet and send out a correction: “CORRECTION: Thornburg found NOT guilty of murder!” Correct anything that alters your audience’s clear understanding of the event. Misspellings and things like that probably don’t merit corrections. If someone has re-tweeted a fact error that you made, be sure to @mention them in your correction so they’ll be more likely to see it and pass it along, too.

Tweet photos and (brief) video. Give people a sense that they are going “behind the scenes” with you — that you’re taking them to a place they can’t go.

Interview participants and observers. Tweet a photo and a quote of the person. Be sure to @mention them.

When you end your live coverage, tell your audience that you’re wrapping up… and they they can go to your website or print publication soon to see your full wrap-up of the event.

After the Event

Use Storify to pull together your quotes. Embed the Storify on your site.

Follow-up the next day with a moderated live online discussion with one of the event’s participants. Or just allow your readers to ask you questions. Two good tools to use for live discussions on your site are CoverItLive and ScribbleLive.

Live Audio & Video

With UStream, you can turn your iPhone into a broadcast truck. It doesn’t matter whether the event has a huge following or not, imagine that suddenly you don’t just work for the newspaper of record for in your community but also the CSPAN.

I made an error in the piece I wrote for PBS Media Shift Idea Lab yesterday. I misrepresented the audience for The Columbia Tribune. The paper’s general manager, Andy Waters, kindly brought it to my attention and I want to offer a correction here.

Numbers that Waters sent me from The Media Audit show that the news organization reaches nearly 80 percent of the 130,000 adults in its market. I used a small potential audience base and a smaller penetration rate when I wrote up the post. That number was no good and I should’ve known better than to use it. I simply took the print circulation and divided it by the Census estimate of residents in Columbia.

You could go all night quibbling about audience measurement methodologies, but whatever faults The Media Audit numbers may or may not have, they are certainly better than the way I tried to calculate it.

And I think this is a particularly important measurement to correct because of the number of unsourced posts that you can find on the Internet saying that the Tribune lost anywhere between 25 and 40 percent of its online audience when it implemented online subscriptions. I’m not fact-checking those claims one way or the other, and even if true they may not be important. I’m repeating it here only to provide context for the correction and to hopefully spur some critical thinking about any audience claims you see — including mine.

Anyway. The Media Audit numbers that Waters showed me indicate that out of a base population of 130,634 adults 18 or older, 103,260 of them – or 79 percent – say they read the Tribune either in print or online. The print edition (weekday/Sunday) reaches 62 percent of the market at least once a week, and the website reaches 52.5 percent of the market at least once a month.

I hope that gives a better picture of the kind of environment in which the Tribune’s OpenBlock experiment is taking place. And the point I was trying to make I think remains valid — that Columbia, Mo., is WAY different than Chicago or Charlotte or San Francisco.

Here’s a great exercise for journalism professors who are introducing their students to data-driven journalism. It provides a good opportunity to show them that they have to get over the common perception that data is unbiased — clean and clear. It gives instructors an opportunity to talk about the need to “interview” the data.

The assignment is deceptively simple: Have the students download the Census Bureau’s list of rural and urban counties and calculate the population density for the counties in your state.

That’s it. Tell them no more. Depending on where they get stuck, slowly reveal to them the clues they need to complete the project. What you may not be surprised to find is that too many college undergrads seem to be accustomed to following step-by-step instructions and too few know how to break down a problem into smaller, sequential pieces. This is the kind of critical thinking skills that they need to be good journalists. Or, as I like to say, think journalistically regardless of their eventual profession.

Helping Them Get Unstuck

Force your students to get a quick start. Don’t let them sit and stare at their computer screens for even a second. Agitate them in whatever way you need to make them feel like an asteroid is about to smash the earth to smithereens. They can’t solve the whole problem all at once, so what are the pieces of the problem hidden inside this big problem?

Students will click around the Census site a bit trying to find what they want. Ask how skimmed and how many read every word on each page. A good opportunity to talk about the way people use information online.

You can help students find the data they need. And from there you can show them basic file-management and Excel techniques. Where does the file download on their computer? What’s the difference between a .csv and a .xlsx file?

With the data open in Excel, they’ll need to sort to filter out just their state. But now what? Ask the students what they think each of the columns represent. What does it mean that something has a POP_UA of 10791 and a STATE of 37?

Once they figure that out, they may note that the data includes some pre-calculated population density. But it’s not the information you asked them to find, so they’ll have to calculate population density — a commonly-needed, very simple journalism math equation.

This gives you a chance to explain that numbers are only meaningful in relation to other numbers. And how to do basic calculations in Excel.

The students will do the math correctly, but they won’t get answers that make any sense. A chance for you to talk with them about how data still has to pass the sniff test. Why doesn’t the data make sense? They can find the answer back on the Census website.

Once they’ve made the correct calculations (how many meters are in a mile anyway?), you can talk with them about how you still need to find the story in the data. Even though their calculations have added value to the data — essentially refining raw ore — mere presentation is of marginal value.

You can top off the conversation by coming back to language, and that journalistic aspiration for precision and objectivity. What does “rural” mean anyway? What does the dictionary say? Is it an abstract concept or something you can measure? How (many different ways) does the Census measure it? How is it different than the USDA’s definition? Which is better? Why?

This is a project that could take several weeks as a module in a college class, or as a MOOC or quick conference or newsroom workshop. Its strength is its scope and flexibility. Just like a good journalist.

In 2008, McCain conceded even while he was still ahead in North Carolina. Of course, after all precincts reported it was Obama who won became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win the state. It will be at least 9:30 before the state is called and I suspect that the longer it stays open the worse it looks for Romney.

If N.H. and Mich. don’t go for Obama right away, then he may be in trouble there.
If N.J. doesn’t get called right away, it’ll probably not be an indication of anything other than storm-related voting issues.

Colorado is another of those states that didn’t get called in 2008 until after McCain conceded shortly after 11 p.m.

In 2008 at about 9:30 p.m., the networks projected Obama would win Ohio. They also projected Wisconsin going for Obama about the same time. It looks like they both may go Obama’s way this year, too – but Wisconsin before Ohio.

Iowa went for Obama right away in 2008. And he eventually got 54 percent of the vote there. If the state goes to Romney, it would be the second time since 1988. A slow call for Obama here might point in that direction.

I seem to recall that Nevada is very slow to report, but a slow call in Nevada might also be an indication that the state will return to the Republican column.

Of the five remaining undeclared states, Nate Silver predicts that Obama is most likely to win Virginia and Colorado. But winning Virginia would still leave Obama one electoral vote shy of the 270 he needs to win the presidency. So expect this election night to go later than it did four years ago.

Florida and Virginia got called for Obama shortly after 11 p.m. in 2008, allowing networks to project him as the winner. Obama had about 53 percent in Virginia and 51 percent in Florida when all the votes were counted in 2008.

Nevada didn’t get declared until after McCain conceded. Obama ended up with 55 percent of the vote there.

Students in my “Social Media for Reporters” class have been working with Storify this semester, most recently on an assignment to cover University Day — UNC’s birthday. This year, the usually low-attention affair was interrupted by the news of the death of one of UNC and higher education’s most influential people of the last half century — Bill Friday.
Here’s what we learned about using Storify as a reaction piece:

Students agreed they would be inclined to use it primarily as a tool for summarizing reaction or public sentiment, rather than a tool for replaying the tick-tock of a breaking news event. That may have been because of the nature of the assignment.

Don’t write a placeholder headline for your Storify. Once you save it, it permanently becomes the URL of your Storify.

If possible, lead with a photo. Perhaps this is a visual convention that comes over from news article Web pages. But images often set the scene for reaction pieces. Images can quickly show the reader the “what” in what might otherwise be called the lead of the piece, allowing tweets and other content to focus on the “so what”. The images that work best are also images with some text on top of them.

Transitions are critically important, making the difference between a narrative and what otherwise is merely a spreadsheet of quotes. The transitions you write between Storify elements must introduce the immediate next item. If you describe a state of shock at the news of Friday’s death, the next piece of content can’t be a photo of students standing in line for waffles, which is then followed by a tweet reacting to Friday’s death.

Transitions are the paragraph that sets up the quote. Be sure not to repeat in your transition all the information in the quote. Your writing is the “what” and the following tweet is the “so what”.

Tweets work better than Facebook posts as content components of Storify, perhaps because of the visual nature of Storify and the brevity of the tweets.

Also, we found the interaction between Storify and Facebook to be both unwieldy and unreliable. For example, Storify links would disappear from Facebook pages as we navigated through the site, increasing significantly the amount of time it took us to add content from Facebook. We also experienced unpredictable reliability of Storify links on Facebook — sometimes they would work and sometimes they wouldn’t. We tested across browsers, platforms, privacy settings of content and types of content. But we couldn’t discern a clear pattern.

We had two reports of students who said they had to essentially do the assignment twice because of technical difficulties curating and editing the pieces of content in Storify. One had to do with inability to arrange a YouTube video within Storify once it had been added. Solution was to close the browser and re-open Storify.

Note that there’s an important ethical issue to consider when using Storify on Facebook content — you can Storify any content that you can see and then make it public — not “Friend” public, or even Facebook-only public. But Everyone public. You cannot do this with tweets.

The ending of your Storify is critical. Good endings seemed to be a tweet that either spun the story forward, summarized public sentiment or drove the reader to further interactivity and engagement — a place where the reader could react to the story.

As in any reaction piece, you have to be aware of the diversity of your sources. First, consider which kinds of diversity might contribute to different viewpoints. Sometimes it’s racial diversity and sometimes geographic and sometimes political, depending on the story. When journalists mix personal and professional uses on their social networks, they are more likely going to see content that looks like them. Compounding that social and cultural bias is the algorithmic bias — Facebook and Twitter are going to try to give you content its algorithms think you will like. This will be based, presumably, on your previous interactions with content as well as your demographics and the demographics of the people you follow. When using Storify to create a reaction piece, journalists have to go out of their ways to look for different viewpoints. Using custom lists on Twitter and Facebook, geo-targeted searching in HootSuite, and following partisan hashtags or accounts can help mitigate against algorithmic and personal tendencies toward homogeneity.

It’s an old conversation, but one worth bringing up again in this context — understand that reaction pieces on Storify are inherently anecdotal and not a valid survey of public opinion. That said, consider whether you should give an equal amount of space to competing points of view regardless of how frequently you see each perspective. Or, whether you should instead try to weight the balance of space in your piece to reflect the frequency of each point of view you found in your search for content.

Finally, the mix between “inside” and “outside” sources can dramatically change the tone of your Storify piece. In our case, we had reactions to Friday’s death from both University officials as well as students and alumni. Reaction from officials adds the news value of prominence to your piece, but broad public reaction can increase the news values of magnitude and impact.

We didn’t discuss these in class, but here are a few use cases for Storify I’d like to see:

Virtual debate between two or more people on opposing sides of an issue. Take unprompted content from a community and splice it together to create the kind of conversations that seem to be less common in our disaggregated media world.

Fact checking of what people say on social media. Use tools to determine assertions that are both common on social media and appear to be based on fact. Even better would be to find assertions made by different sides on an issue, but based on the same set of facts. It might be interesting to note whether we spin each other just as much as our candidates do.

Linking in news articles is a wildly under-appreciated craft, with many news organizations turning over this critical editorial task to algorithms rather than editors. Today’s sentencing of punk band Pussy Riot in Russia is top news this morning on most national sites, and is a perfect example of how links contribute to the editorial voice of a brand. For example, a quick look at a few of the top sites at 10:30 a.m. ET shows that nytimes.com is the only site linking from their story straight to the video that caused the ruckus in the first place.The New York Times:

“The saga began in February when the women infiltrated Moscow’s main cathedral wearing colorful balaclavas, and pranced around in front of the golden Holy Doors leading into the altar, dancing, chanting and lip-syncing for what would later become a music video of a profane song in which they beseeched the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of Mr. Putin.

Security guards quickly stripped them of their guitars, but the video was completed with splices of footage from another church.”

These two links are among the five in the story. The other three are links to Times Topics pages on Russia, Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church.

The departure text in the story is a bit unclear to me. Links should usually be brief nouns, and I know what I’m getting when I click on “music video”, but I wasn’t sure what I’d be getting when I clicked on “video was completed”. That verb in the departure text made me think it would be a video of the act of completing, or a story about the completing done at the time of completion.

I need to follow up with two questions to the Times. I wonder why there are two links to what at first glance appear to be essentially the same videos. But I also wonder what was the editorial thinking behind linking to the videos in the first place — since clearly others either chose not to do so, or simply didn’t think about the option — and the reason they link to the Russian language versions rather than versions that have an English subtitle. The words in the video are offensive — ones that I’ll bet a good deal of money that the Times wouldn’t print online or on paper. Did they have concerns about linking to offensive language? Is that a reason they didn’t link to the English version?

Newspapers often make choices about what not to link. The Times — and most other papers — didn’t link to video of reporter Daniel Pearl’s beheading. The differences may seem obvious to you. Even if they do, it is important for journalism students and professionals to be able to articulate to themselves and others the differences between a Pussy Riot video and a beheading video.

Finally, I wonder whether there was conversation about the implications that linking to these videos might have on The Times’ ability to distribute the story in Russia or on its ability to report there.

USA Today

The site has a very brief story right now, with only three internal links to topics pages — one on the Virgin Mary, another on Putin and another on Pussy Riot. An interesting mix.

The Huffington Post

Often held up an example of “webby” news production, The Huffington Post story has no links in its story. It seems as if its readers would be better served with links.Yahoo News

Yahoo’s story has more links than any other, and most of them go offsite. And while they link to a video of another video that got Pussy Riot in trouble, they don’t link to the video that’s at the center of today’s story.

The lead graph links to the band’s Live Journal website, and several links throughout the story go to source material — such as Paul McCartney’s statement in support of Pussy Riot — or go to other media sites. Yahoo links both to NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, The Week, Wikipedia, Gazeta.ru and Reuters. It’s an example of one media company benefiting from the reporting of others by curating their stories — and I say that without judgment one way or the other.

NBC News & CNN

This site has long had a style of putting links to related stories in-line between paragraphs, rather than off to the site where the click-through rate is — or at least was at one time — about half of the in-line click-through rate. It continues that editorial voice here, which is a decision to make links not part of the narrative, but a diversion from it. This is not a single multi-linear story, but several adjacent pieces of related articles.

In other words, what’s the difference between “Unsubscribing” from one of your friends on Facebook or adding them to your Acquaintance list?

Subscribing to someone is a way of seeing their Facebook updates in your News Feed without being friends with the person.

While you don’t have to be friends with someone to subscribe to them, you do automatically become subscribed when you become friends.

Once you are subscribed, you further limit what you see from someone by mousing over one of their content items that appears in your News Feed and selecting the down arrow that appears on the upper right of the post. You can choose to see “All Updates” or “Most Updates” or “Only Important”. The default is “Most Updates”.

Facebook’s algorithm determines the precise meanings of each of those terms. “The news feed algorithm uses several factors, including: how many friends are commenting on a certain piece of content, who posted the content, and what type of content it is (e.g. photo, video, or status update),” according to Facebook.

Selecting “Only Important” does not automatically add a friend to your Acquaintance list.

Acquaintance lists can also be used to manage which of your posts are seen by the members of that list. When you post a piece of content on Facebook, you can choose to share it with “Friends except Acquaintances”.

Facebook says that “people on your Acquaintances list will rarely show up in your news feed,” so it would seem to me.

Right off the bat, you’re going to learn that your ability to troubleshoot ambiguous instructions and consider all relevant variables will be key to your success as a computational journalist. Getting started with Python depends on which operating system you are using.

Python on a Mac

The easiest operating system on which to start is Apple’s OS X, which is install on all Macintosh computers. Every version of OS X ships with a default version of Python already installed. The “Lion” version of OS X — versions that begin with 10.7 — ship with Python 2.7.1 or (I think) 2.7.3. That’s great, because 2.7.3 is one of the most recent versions of Python, and the version we’ll be using here. (I’ll tell you in a bit why I say that 2.7.3 is one of the most recent versions.)

Earlier versions of OS X — such as 10.6 “Snow Leopard” — come with earlier versions of Python, such as 2.6.1 or something like that. For now at least, that’s no big prob.

Here’s how you can find out which version of Python is installed on your Macintosh:

Go to Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal

At the $ prompt, type “python –version”, and hit the [Return] key

You should get a response that tells you what version of Python you have installed by default. Go ahead and get Python started by typing at the $ prompt: “python,” and then hitting the [Return] key

Python on Windows

Python does not come with Windows computers, so you will have to download and install it. Here’s how:

Once downloaded, double-click the installer to run it. It will take another 2 minutes to install.

Unless there’s some reason not to, leave all the default choices selected.

Python will be installed at C:Python27 and it will take up about 51MB of space. In your Start menu you will also see “IDLE (Python GUI)”. Let’s go ahead and launch Python now by clicking on that icon.

Python on Linux/Ubuntu/Amazon AWS

Many hard-core programmers work on some flavor of the free Linux operating system. Ubuntu is the version I use. You can install Ubuntu as an alternate operating system on either a Mac or a Windows PC. On my Mac, I use the freely available Virtual Box application from Oracle to create what’s called a virtual machine that allows me to run Ubuntu in RAM while I’m also working in the OS X operating system. But you can also install Ubuntu on your Mac using Apple’s own Boot Camp application (which you can find in Utilities) or a program called Parallels. I will say that Virtual Box is not particularly user friendly, and Boot Camp might be your best bet.

Finally, at some point you will want to put the applications you write in Python on the Web. To do that, you’ll need access to a Web server. Probably the easiest and cheapest place to start is the EC2 service from Amazon Web services, by going to https://aws.amazon.com. The upside of using AWS is that you can launch within minutes a Web server running the most recent version of Ubuntu and Python, and the cost is $1-$15 per month unless you do some heavy work. The downside is that security configuration that allows you to connect to create Python programs by using the “command line” — the Terminal on a Mac or on a Windows PC — can be a bit hairy. But you’ll have to learn how to do it eventually so now might as well be the time.

Troubleshooting

By now you should have a version of Python up and running on either a Mac, a PC or on a remote service like Amazon EC2. Or… you might have run into trouble. Most trouble you encounter is going to be because you’re reading instructions that differ, in some small way, from the operating system you’re using or the version of Python you’re using, or a thousand other small things. When you’re Googling for tutorials or forums on Linux, be sure you know the numerical version of your operating system and your version of Python. But even that may not be enough, because many authors have written their tutorials using outdated versions or they aren’t clear about which versions they’re using. Get used it. Be skeptical. Go slowly. Be calm.

Two potential errors I want to check with you right now:

Don’t use any flavor of Python 3. Use only Python 2. Right now there are two “branches” of Python, and all of the applications we’re using will require Python 2. In this case, bigger is not better.

On a Mac — and Ubuntu to some degree — be careful when you feel a temptation to “upgrade” to a new version of Python. Python comes with Macs for a reason — the operating system needs it to be a certain version in a certain location. Change it and things can get messed up beyond my ability to explain it. The built-in version of Python on a Mac will be at /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework and /usr/bin/python. If you install a different version, it — in an ideal world — will be at /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework. You should be able to use the command line in Terminal to navigate to those directories, and if you don’t know how to do that now is the time to ask a human for help. Your likelihood of finding the answer via Google will be inefficient at beast and frustrating at worst.